Thursday, September 1, 2011

"Search for a recipe or ingredient (ex: chili, banana bread, lentils). After searching for a recipe or ingredient on Google, select Recipes in the left-hand panel on the search results page. You can filter your results by ingredients, cook time, or calories."

The Google "recipes" feature has several trivial bugs:

Bug #1:

Ordinary searches are better than searches using the "recipes" feature because they A) return a greater number of recipe results, and B) allow you to add contextual keywords to make your searches more precise.

Finding recipes using a standard Google query might require an additional mouse click or two to drill down to the recipes, but the tradeoff of gaining more relevant recipes makes it worth while.

When you use the "recipes" feature, a list of ingredients displays with yes/no option buttons. The first part of the bug is that it is not clear what result you get if you do not select either yes or no for an ingredient. Maybe the ingredient will be included in the recipe and perhaps it won't?

However, the main part of bug #2 is that the set of ingredients you can include/exclude is limited and in many instances arbitrary.

When using the "recipes" feature, if you want a list of salad recipes to contain cucumbers, broccoli, and gorgonzola cheese and exclude jalapeno peppers you are out of luck. However, you could run a query for those recipes using a traditional Google search.

Here are the severely limited forced choice inventories of ingredients you can include/exclude from a recipes feature search for [salad] and for [omelette] :